A couple months ago, I blogged about setting up the CentOS 6.3 template for what was then known as Application Director. The template configuration process has significantly improved in 6.1, but there are still a couple steps that aren’t entirely clear in the documentation. Here’s how I was able to successfully configure the template.

Prepare the CentOS 6.3 template

After downloading the CentOS 6.3 .ovf, .mf, and .vmdk file, deploy the ovf to your destination vSphere cluster using the vCenter web or thick client. Make sure you’re deploying it to the cluster(s) that are assigned to the appropriate business group within vCloud Automation Center. Take a snapshot here, in case you need to revert to the original template.

Power on the VM, and open the VM console. Logon using username root and password vmware. You’ll need to change the contents of two files as they contain left over network information from eng.vmware.com.

Make a backup of resolv.conf and then empty the file. This will force the VM to use the DNS settings provided by your network DHCP.

Download, chmod, and run the preparevCACTemplate.sh according to the documentation. The documentation isn’t clear on it, but vCloud Automation Center Manager Service Server IP/FQDN hostname is your vCloud Automation Center server (or the IP/FQDN of the Manager Server Service’s load balancer if running in HA mode), not the IaaS server.

JRE 1.7.0 Update 51 is already installed on the CentOS 6.3 x32 template available from VMware, with release date 2014-09-09.

Providing the script completed successfully (ignore the certificate verification error in the output if you opted to not check it), you should be good to go.

Note: There’s no need to install the vCloud Automation Center guest agent (gugent) as preparevCACTemplate.sh does this automatically now.